Although this deals mostly with the malls in the Seattle area (since the original article was posted to a Seattle-specific site,) the point I’m trying to make is that even though some individual malls may falter and fail, the traditional shopping mall isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I also tend to be just a bit skeptical of the whole urban village concept, but that’t another article I haven’t written yet.

I think the success of shopping malls is really closely linked to our need for a town square, piazza, courtyard or whatever urban planners would call that “heart” of the community, but they’ve always been a proxy in a way, and not necessarily the best substitute for a real community meeting place. Developers have tried their best… incorporating playgrounds, libraries etc, but ultimately its a capitalist /retail substitute for something that a town’s planning and architecture should have provided. With the explosion in franchising in the past 10 years, they’ve become increasingly homogenous and maybe that’s contributed to their decline. A mall that looks and feels much like any other mall is not much of a place for giving a community a “unique and vibrant town centre”.

Some big errors in city planning and architecture have left many communities without much of an alternative, so New Urbanism seems like a really important movement to me. Urban planning is an established and well researched and developed science. It’s not like we are clueless about what makes spaces work or not work. It’s just that at some point someone decided cars, or corporate interests, were more important than people.

To answer your last question… I’d remove the financial imperative in some way, so that developers/mall-managers didn’t have to maximise their ROI on every square inch of space. It seems to me that this has led to aggressive franchises spreading like viruses and shopping centres becoming soulless. Mix retail with government services, social organisations, theatre and arts. Evaluate the tenant mix according to their usefulness or potential contribution to the community rather than how much they are willing to pay for a space. Set space aside for young entrepreneurs and local artist galleries, which might not be able to pay full retail prices. Consider groups in the community like theosophical societies, meditation centres, youth groups etc that might have trouble finding appropriate space elsewhere.